(Perhaps you’d prefer to pretend to see the sun, but that won’t do, not with a forecast calling for 10 days’ worth of rain.)

Seattle last month had 24 rainy days, two more than Oakland and one less than San Francisco — both records for the Bay Area.

Except that in Seattle, no one even noticed.

“Oh no,” said Seattle meteorologist Julie Holcombe of the National Weather Service. “We’re a little bitbelow normal. … In fact, of the days it was rainy, we’d normally get more.”

But in California, nothing about this is normal. Rain fell Monday. It should fall again today and again Wednesday. Thursday might be dry, but rain should fall Friday, Saturday and again Sunday, Monday and Tuesday — as far as the National Weather Service can see, in fact.

“It is miserable,” said Suzanne Anderson, the weather service meteorologist who wrote Monday’s Bay Area forecast. “‘It’s just grim. I’m sorry.”

So perhaps it’s best to take on the philosophy of those who live where rain is a part of life. Even if many of us are here precisely because it isn’t.

Since 1963, Arriola has lived in Ketchikan, on the Alaska panhandle, where annual rainfall is measured in feet — 13 of them on average — and rain is known as “liquid sunshine.”

Ketchikan had 39 consecutive days of such sunshine last fall, which wasn’t a record. The record was 101 consecutive days of rain, set in 1953.

“We go outside, we swim in the rain, we jump in the river. The kids don’t care,” said Arriola, who has two children, ages 9 and 13. “You just find something to do. … Because if you didn’t, you’d be stuck in the house 365 days a year.”

Ketchikan’s rainfall last year topped 16 feet, which also wasn’t a record. San Francisco, most of the way through its rain year, has seen 30 inches, which isn’t a record, either (that would be the 49.4 inches that fell from 1861 to 1862).

But Ketchikan is in the midst of the continent’s only temperate rain forest. Here, the ongoing rain is starting to raise some serious concerns.

The wet ground can cause tree roots to lose their hold. A large oak tree fell on a house Monday morning on Dale Avenue in San Carlos, although no one was hurt.

“Levees are saturated. The ground’s saturated. The water has to go somewhere,” said Don Strickland, a spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources.

Flood control officers are “showing a great deal of watchfulness,” he said, increasing releases from major reservoirs in anticipation of snow runoff from the mountains adding to rivers already running high.